Night 1: Trouble Sleeping

My Airbnb host speaks very little English, and I speak just as much French. She is an older woman and I am sleeping in what may or may not be her child's old bedroom. She slumbers in the room next to me. The wall between us is thin; I think I can hear her breathing. I sleep for a while and then the my jet-lagged body clock wakes me up in the middle of the night with Mercy Seat by Nick Cave rolling around in my head. I don't know the lyrics, so it's just an every churning cycle of the snippets i do remember: and the Mercy Seat is something / and I think my head is burning / and in a way I'm yearning to be done with all this searching for the truth / an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth / and anyway I told the truth; and I'm not afraid to lie. I don't want these words in my head, they are just the thing that my brain chose to have me thinking instead of getting the sleep I needed. After what feels like an hour of staring at the inside of my eyelids, or the strange curtain draped over my DIY closet thing, I hear coughing from the next room. It's normal at first, then it stops and starts again with more vigor. In my daze, I start to wonder how long I would need to listen to this before I gather the courage to go and check on this complete stranger who doesn't speak my language. I run through many bad scenarios at once: One: I don't check on her and she passes in her sleep, leading me into a life of guilt over a death I could have prevented, and quite possibly a nightmarish court drama where I'm accused of being one of these worst-fear Airbnb murderers who jump from spot to spot satisfying their thirst for blood upon the unsuspecting and enterprising homeowners. Or, two: I do check on her and she's just hacking up some of that quotidian cigarette gunk, but now she thinks I'm one of those worst-fear Airbnb murderers and grabs her bedside bat in a flash. Luckily, I wait it out, and she's alive in the morning. She even offers me breakfast, although not the one she brought over in a tray. That was for her. I understood this after saying a sleepy "Merci!" to her as she set herself up on the little porch outside my window. Oh no, she explained, breakfast is "self service." That's one English phrase she did know. I got bashful and carried on into the kitchen to tool around for some bread and Nutella.

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